Group items tagged

population of users on a particular social bookmarking site influences not only the amount but also the type and quality of bookmarks in the system.

In all these examples, the community of users is an important factor in ensuring the quality of the resources bookmarked in the system.

Social bookmarking tools allow users to classify their bookmarks by assigning tags

With regard to information literacy instruction, Luo (2010) found evidence that librarians are using tags to present course-specific resources to students.

hey can also be used to engage students in resource discovery

This use of social bookmarking initiated from a need to simply collect and share resources but has yielded other benefits. Traditionally in projects of this type, librarians collate lists of resources that are then passed on to the web developer to turn into a web page. This is fairly labour intensive for the web developer and means that any time subject librarians want to add or edit links they have to submit the changes to the web developer. Scholar includes a tool that allows RSS feeds to be created from searches of Scholar tags. In this case, the web developer just created links to the Scholar feeds – rather than manually creating lists of links and descriptions in HTML. As well as saving the initial job of manually creating HTML pages, it allows the page to be dynamic. If a subject librarian wants to add a web resource to the page, all they have to do is to bookmark that page with the appropriate tags in Scholar. The new webpage is automatically added to the feed without the need for the intervention of the web developer.

librarians can share each other's discoveries.